For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their own everyday opinion.
Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.
Every human endeavor, however singular it seems, involves the whole human race.
To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors, and crimes, recognize the obvious superiority of the socialist camp.
Remember, Orestes: you were part of my herd, you grazed in the fields along with my sheep. Your liberty is nothing but a mange eating away at you, it is nothing but an exile.
So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.
At times discreetly, at times disgustingly, I yielded to the most fatal temptation whenever I could no longer bear it: as a result of impatience, Orpheus lost Eurydice; as a result of impatience, I lost myself.
Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.
Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.
Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.
Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding.
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.
If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.
L’homme est une passion inutile. Man is a useless passion.
Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn’t exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn’t possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey.
We make our own hell out of the people around us.
In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary.
It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.
Criminals together. We’re in hell, my little friend, and there’s never any mistake there. People are not damned for nothing.
What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.